Herbert Hoover: West Branch's Unlikely World Figure

Just off the interstate, the small Iowa town of West Branch holds a national historic site that rewards the stop. This is where Herbert Hoover was born on August tenth, eighteen seventy-four, in a two-room white cottage measuring just fourteen by twenty feet. His father was a blacksmith. His mother was a devout Quaker minister. Both parents were dead before Herbert turned nine, and the orphaned boy left West Branch for good, headed for life with an uncle in Oregon.

What followed is one of the more unusual careers in American history. Hoover trained as a mining engineer at Stanford and became wealthy managing gold mines in Australia and China. By nineteen fourteen he was a successful forty-year-old private citizen living in London when the First World War broke out. What he did next made him a household name across Europe before most Americans knew who he was.

Germany occupied Belgium. The British naval blockade blocked food imports. Seven million Belgian civilians faced starvation. Hoover organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium, convinced both the British and the Germans to let food shipments through, and over five years delivered nearly six million tons of food to nearly ten million desperate civilians. No government ordered him to do it. He simply did it.

Woodrow Wilson then appointed him US Food Administrator. He persuaded Americans to voluntarily eat less wheat and meat. Meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays. He exported the surplus to Allied armies. The word Hooverize entered the English language as a verb meaning to conserve food.

He served as Secretary of Commerce and then won the presidency in nineteen twenty-eight, only to have the Great Depression begin ten months later. History treated him harshly. But the Presidential Library and Museum here, which opened in nineteen sixty-two on his childhood grounds, tells the longer story of a Quaker blacksmith's son who fed a continent and then got blamed for a crash he did not cause.